Cause Of Sinking Feeling Still Up In The Air

July 7, 2001|By Stephanie Erickson, Sentinel Staff Writer

TAVARES -- A Tampa engineer who has crawled through the mess at a popular Lake County restaurant said Friday that a sinkhole was not the cause of a growing 50-foot hole that has swallowed much of the eatery's back deck.

But the owner of Amigos Original Tex-Mex Restaurant & Cantina on U.S. Highway 441 said that preliminary tests show it was a sinkhole and that the engineer, who is overseeing the U.S. 441 widening project, is not qualified to make that determination.

"He has nothing to do with this," Amigos president Andy Hyltin said. "He is building the road."

Armando Perez, project engineer with Tampa Bay Engineering, said he crawled through large pipes to what he calls "ground zero" and found a rotted pipe underneath the building that has allowed water to wash away the dirt.

"I analyzed the whole thing,'' he said. "I would not categorize it as a sinkhole."

Perez insisted that current and past road construction had nothing to do with the cave-in, which occurred last week.

He said a sea wall separates the property from the road, which is being widened from Lake Shore Drive near the restaurant to Lake Eustis Drive.

Someone had added a drainage pipe sometime after the sea wall and road were built in order to add decking to the back of the building, Perez said.

"The piping rotted and failed, and the water going through the pipe wound up undermining the building," he said.

June's afternoon rains added to the problem, he said.

"All of the negatives that could come together came together," he said.

Hyltin said he will listen to the findings of people who specialize in analyzing sinkhole-related episodes.

Workers from two geo-technical companies are running tests, including core drills, to determine what caused the cave-in before determining how best to fix it.

The restaurant will remain closed at least through next week while experts try to figure out the cause.

"Hopefully we will know next week," Hyltin said. "It doesn't matter what it is. We're going to fix it. We're just trying to figure out what it is so we can fix it the right way."